If you read this, you probably have a web-site or a personal blog. Anyway, you know what is a favicon. A favicon is an icon representing your web-site in bookmarks, address bar, etc. In 99% it’s 16×16 px ico file and in 99% it looks ugly on a Retina device. This is how my Bookmarks bar looks in Chrome.

Icons on the left are made with retina quality, and icons on the right are not. To fix it, we need 32×32 px version of the icon. Once you’ve made it, you need an ico file containing both 16x16px and 32x32px icons. I’d recommend to use X-Icon Editor – a web-based tool doing all dirty job for you. All you need is:

Upload 32x32px PNG icon

Leave 16×16 and 32×32 options checked and uncheck others

Click OK and download ICO file

Rename it to favicon.ico and upload it to yours web-site document root. So it’s available at http://mydomain.com/favicon.ico

As an IntelliJ IDEA user, you may notice user interface changes from version to version. And IMHO it looks better and better. Anyway, there are always some guys who don’t like any UI changes. To make these users feel comfortable with changes we made, I wrote a plugin that enables old IntelliJ icons.

Download the plugin from here /idea11icons.jar Then go to IDEA Preferences -> Plugins -> Install from disk. Then restart IDEA.

UPDATE: The plugin has been updated to version 1.1 due compatibility issues with IntelliJ IDEA 13. Please download again and re-install